The continental tradition in philosophy has gotten more "materialistic" over the last two hundred years. This has resulted from a combination of some very specific moves with regard to the epistemological parameters of understanding and the assertion that ideas may have material force in history. Therefore, the materialism within the continental tradition is not a materiality of being, but a materiality of understanding and action. Such an inquiry opens up space between the activities of sensation and the mental faculty of cognition. 'I think, therefore I am,' is not an empirical statement, but a statement of cognition. It is assumed that this distinction is at the core of continental philosophy. Cognition is always interpretive. Experience is the start of cognition, but not its final product. Our cognitions cannot be separated from our experience of the physical, social, and cultural environment around us. The symbolic nature of language reinforces the interpretive nature of our thoughts and ideas. Our language is, therefore, always projecting an implicit image of the world. Language is, therefore, always political. The materiality of these cognitive world-views is manifested in two ways. First, in their formation. They are the products of sensual contact with the world. Second, in their effects. They move people. It is a picture of the world which serves to shape the content and character of human behavior. Whether we want to call these phantoms of the mind, world-view, ideas, thoughts, cognitions, or any other term, the dual character of their materiality is secure. This work examines the threads materialist ideas running through the efforts of some major authors in the continental tradition in philosophy. A model of materialism is constructed in Chapter One and used to assess the materialist elements in works from Kant, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and contemporary poststructuralism. The work demonstrates the evolution of materialist thinking within the tradition and asserts an evolving and developing articulation of materialism in relation to the thoughts and activities of human beings.

Well into the twenty-first century, the United States remains one of the most highly religious industrial democracies on earth. Recent Gallup surveys suggest that 76 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is divinely inspired or the direct word of God. In Medieval America, Andrew M Koch and Paul H. Gates, Jr. offer a thoughtful examination of how this strong religious feeling, coupled with Christian doctrine, affects American political debates and collective practices and surveying the direct and indirect influence of religion and faith on American political culture. Koch and Gates open a more critical dialogue on the political influence of religion in American politics, showing that people's faith shapes their political views and the policies they support. Even with secular structures and processes, a democratic regime will reflect the belief patterns distributed among the public. Delving into a perspicacious analysis of the religious components in current practices in education, the treatment of political symbols, crime and punishment, the human body, and democratic politics, they contend that promoting and maintaining a free, open, and tolerant society requires the necessary limitation of religious influence in the domains of law and policy. Readers interested in religion and politics will find much to discuss in this incisive exploration of Christian beliefs and their impact on American political discourse.

Well into the twenty-first century, the United States remains one of the most highly religious industrial democracies on earth. Recent Gallup surveys suggest that 76 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is divinely inspired or the direct word of God. In Medieval America, Andrew M Koch and Paul H. Gates, Jr. offer a thoughtful examination of how this strong religious feeling, coupled with Christian doctrine, affects American political debates and collective practices and surveying the direct and indirect influence of religion and faith on American political culture. Koch and Gates open a more critical dialogue on the political influence of religion in American politics, showing that people's faith shapes their political views and the policies they support. Even with secular structures and processes, a democratic regime will reflect the belief patterns distributed among the public. Delving into a perspicacious analysis of the religious components in current practices in education, the treatment of political symbols, crime and punishment, the human body, and democratic politics, they contend that promoting and maintaining a free, open, and tolerant society requires the necessary limitation of religious influence in the domains of law and policy. Readers interested in religion and politics will find much to discuss in this incisive exploration of Christian beliefs and their impact on American political discourse.

Drawing on the genealogical tradition developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, Democracy and Domination: Technologies of Integration and the Rise of Collective Power argues that from the time of Ancient Greece to the present, the collective and centralizing aspects of power have been expanding in the Western world. This expansion can be located within institutional structures that coordinate human activity, requiring populations to have some technology by which the act of communication takes place. This work examines the rise of phonetic writing and the formalization of teaching as preconditions for the expansion of collective power. Speech and writing provide populations a common language and history, thus providing the cultural integration necessary for the synchronization of action. However, for this coordination of activities on a mass scale there must also be institutional structures for the formal training of system managers and officials. Large polities require infrastructure, some formal economic arrangements, and a system of production to meet the material needs of the population. Each of these institutional arrangements is treated as a mechanism that expands the scope and depth of power. Finally, there must be some social technology that sets the direction that collective action takes. Since the seventeenth century, this role has been taken by the practice of democracy. The authors reject the idea that democracy expanded because it was the most consistent with the human being's ontological quest for freedom, asserting instead that the expansion of democracy takes place in the modern period because of its ability to legitimate the expansion and centralization of power itself. Thus, the systemic needs for greater coordination of human activity on a national and global scale have pushed democracy to the forefront as a system for legitimating the collectivization and coordination of human behavior.

Since the time of Plato, political philosophy has attempted to create a secure basis upon which to build the prescriptive claims for political action. However, if knowledge is a human construction, not the discovery of some essential reality, is it possible to support collective acts by reference to such foundational claims? If not, we must rethink our understanding society, politics, and the exercise of power. Beginning with the premise that our knowledge of political and social life is historical and contingent, Andrew Koch seeks to re-conceptualize our understanding of politics and power. Koch moves the discussions of power and politics away from search for foundational truths. Viewing politics and power through an epistemological lens, he explores what our understanding of politics and power looks like in the wake of deconstruction and genealogy. Koch begins with a general overview of the poststructuralist epistemology. From there the work contrasts this position with the interpretive sociology of Max Weber, uses deconstruction to politicize the work of Niklas Luhmann, and explores the implications of deconstruction for democracy, Marxist theory, institutional power, and anarchist politics.

Since the time of Plato, political philosophy has attempted to create a secure basis upon which to build the prescriptive claims for political action. However, if knowledge is a human construction, not the discovery of some essential reality, is it possible to support collective acts by reference to such foundational claims? If not, we must rethink our understanding society, politics, and the exercise of power. Beginning with the premise that our knowledge of political and social life is historical and contingent, Andrew Koch seeks to re-conceptualize our understanding of politics and power. Koch moves the discussions of power and politics away from search for foundational truths. Viewing politics and power through an epistemological lens, he explores what our understanding of politics and power looks like in the wake of deconstruction and genealogy. Koch begins with a general overview of the poststructuralist epistemology. From there the work contrasts this position with the interpretive sociology of Max Weber, uses deconstruction to politicize the work of Niklas Luhmann, and explores the implications of deconstruction for democracy, Marxist theory, institutional power, and anarchist politics.

In Romance and Reason Andrew Koch notes that in the annals of social research the jury is still out on Max Weber. It is for no other reason than Weber's enormous body of foundational work in sociology that he is continually undergoing several simultaneous versions of integration into contemporary social research. Whether Weber is a central, secondary, or tertiary consideration in social research it behooves any social scientist to take a position on the work of Max Weber. In this erudite new intellectual biography Koch argues that Weber's understanding of the Enlightenment, in all its epistemological and ontological structures, conveys the Enlightenment itself as an alienating worldview. As a result, Koch contends, the full depth of Weber's body of work has yet to be excavated and studied. Romance and Reason is an analysis of the genesis of the concept of alienation and, in an imaginative and necessary turn, Koch works to recreate the context in which Weber understood alienation in both the intellectual and lived sense. This book is a fundamental explication on the contemporary Weber and is a salient addition to sociology, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and any field that is invested in understanding contemporary culture and society.

In Romance and Reason Andrew Koch notes that in the annals of social research the jury is still out on Max Weber. It is for no other reason than Weber's enormous body of foundational work in sociology that he is continually undergoing several simultaneous versions of integration into contemporary social research. Whether Weber is a central, secondary, or tertiary consideration in social research it behooves any social scientist to take a position on the work of Max Weber. In this erudite new intellectual biography Koch argues that Weber's understanding of the Enlightenment, in all its epistemological and ontological structures, conveys the Enlightenment itself as an alienating worldview. As a result, Koch contends, the full depth of Weber's body of work has yet to be excavated and studied. Romance and Reason is an analysis of the genesis of the concept of alienation and, in an imaginative and necessary turn, Koch works to recreate the context in which Weber understood alienation in both the intellectual and lived sense. This book is a fundamental explication on the contemporary Weber and is a salient addition to sociology, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and any field that is invested in understanding contemporary culture and society.

What happens after some social group, a tribe, clan, or even a modern nation, agrees-either tacitly or explicitly to govern and be governed according to an idea. The United States is governed by ideas laid down in the Constitution; The former Soviet Union by both Lenin and Stalin's interpretation of Karl Marx's thought. Regardless of social group, when deciding on the form of politics that ought to govern our social world the question of "certainty" is pivotal. How can we know that this way of governing is the best way? What happens when the strength of our certainty supercedes the actual political and social consequences that arise from agreed upon forms of governance? In Knowledge and Social Construction Andrew Koch makes the case that the more hypothetical and theoretical we are towards knowledge claims (our certainty) the more open our society will be. Following from the premise that human nature and subjectivity are social constructions, this book seeks to reorient the reader-away from the ontological tradition in political philosophy and toward an epistemological framework. Through an investigation of four competing epistemological models that are used in classic political and social philosophy texts, Andrew Koch provides us with an alternative framework for understanding social arrangements, conflicts, and institutions. This book, unlike anything written recently, represents a challenge to political science, philosophy, sociology: any discipline concerned with epistemology, society, culture, and politics.

The continental tradition in philosophy has gotten more "materialistic" over the last two hundred years. This has resulted from a combination of some very specific moves with regard to the epistemological parameters of understanding and the assertion that ideas may have material force in history. Therefore, the materialism within the continental tradition is not a materiality of being, but a materiality of understanding and action. Such an inquiry opens up space between the activities of sensation and the mental faculty of cognition. 'I think, therefore I am,' is not an empirical statement, but a statement of cognition. It is assumed that this distinction is at the core of continental philosophy. Cognition is always interpretive. Experience is the start of cognition, but not its final product. Our cognitions cannot be separated from our experience of the physical, social, and cultural environment around us. The symbolic nature of language reinforces the interpretive nature of our thoughts and ideas. Our language is, therefore, always projecting an implicit image of the world. Language is, therefore, always political. The materiality of these cognitive world-views is manifested in two ways. First, in their formation. They are the products of sensual contact with the world. Second, in their effects. They move people. It is a picture of the world which serves to shape the content and character of human behavior. Whether we want to call these phantoms of the mind, world-view, ideas, thoughts, cognitions, or any other term, the dual character of their materiality is secure. This work examines the threads materialist ideas running through the efforts of some major authors in the continental tradition in philosophy. A model of materialism is constructed in Chapter One and used to assess the materialist elements in works from Kant, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and contemporary poststructuralism. The work demonstrates the evolution of materialist thinking within the tradition and asserts an evolving and developing articulation of materialism in relation to the thoughts and activities of human beings.